Culture
Being right about district 1 messaging; PolitiFact prepares for the election; what’s a charter; being right about quantitative easing, First Amendment; and Bob Dylan says what he means. Continue reading on the Ocean State Current…
Today: September 11, global change, evolution, economics, 17th amendment, gold standard, and a boughten electorate… all to a purpose.
Back when the Episcopal/Anglican Church was finding itself fraught with international internal turmoil over the appointment of an openly and actively homosexual bishop in New Hampshire, Catholic writer and blogger Mark Shea predicted, as an aphorism, that the organization would gradually turn toward the promotion of homosexuality. I always considered that a plausible, but not…
Politicos and policy wonks have been parsing every major speech offered at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida, each with his or her own lens. (The exception is MSNBC, which apparently declined to parse several speeches by ethnic minorities.) Some have commented on the gender-war content of Ann Romney’s statements; some have focused on…
Violence in movies is not the problem. Violent stories are as old as fiction. Likewise, the realism of cinema and video games may be new, but in prior eras people didn’t need the visual aids. The livestock bled when slaughtered; the forest road was menacing in a way that needed no symphonic score. The problem…
The Stephen Hopkins Center for Civil Rights’ panel discussion on the event of Milton Friedman’s hundredth birthday offset “liberaltarian” Brown professor John Tomasi with June Speakman, a Roger Williams professor more inclined to agree with the prefix of the coinage. The panel would have benefited from the inclusion of an unabridged conservative who agreed with…
In a strong indication that, among journalistic practitioners, the biased media narrative is more a matter of intellectual laziness than cultural duplicity, the latest canned story, by Los Angeles Times reporter Don Lee, is that workplace discrimination is landing men the great majority of “newly created” jobs: Since the recession ended in June 2009, men…
President Obama’s teleprompter style has been the subject of substantial (often mocking) critical commentary, and with some justification, as this nearly parodic 2010 video from a Virginia classroom proves: Given recent political events, one can sympathize with the desire of public officials to avoid extemporaneous speech. In a world in which one’s every public utterance…
Continuing along the happiness trail, if it isn’t exactly money, then what is it? According to Arthur Brooks, it may just be your political ideology. So, who is happier? Liberals or Conservatives? Scholars on both the left and right have studied this question extensively, and have reached a consensus that it is conservatives who possess…